Food Porn, Pro-Anorexia and the Viscerality of Virtual Affect Lavis, Anna

View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by University of Birmingham Research Portal Food porn, pro-anorexia and the viscerality of virtual affect Lavis, Anna DOI: 10.1016/j.geoforum.2015.05.014 License: Creative Commons: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs (CC BY-NC-ND) Document Version Peer reviewed version Citation for published version (Harvard): Lavis, A 2015, 'Food porn, pro-anorexia and the viscerality of virtual affect: Exploring eating in cyberspace', Geoforum. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2015.05.014 Link to publication on Research at Birmingham portal Publisher Rights Statement: After an embargo period this document is subject to the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives license Checked October 2015 General rights Unless a licence is specified above, all rights (including copyright and moral rights) in this document are retained by the authors and/or the copyright holders. 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Feb. 2019 Geoforum 2015, Final version pre-publication Food porn, pro-anorexia and the viscerality of virtual affect: Exploring eating in cyberspace Anna Lavis, University of Birmingham Highlights • Intersecting with work on food, affect and viscerality, this paper explores the act of eating. • The paper engages with two empirical contexts: food porn and pro-anorexia. • Geographical discussions of food are enhanced by exploring what eating does and is in cyberspace. • This reveals eating to take place among and beyond bodies, blurring boundaries of virtual and actual. • This invites further interrogation of eating’s uncertain relationship with materialities of bodies and foods, and of the act of eating more widely. Abstract By engaging with ‘pro-anorexia’ and ‘food porn’ on the Internet, this paper explores eating in cyberspace. Reflecting on the ways in which virtual, but affective, consumption is central to both food porn and pro-anorexia websites, the paper asks what the act of eating ‘triggers’ and produces, connects and displaces. It traces how eating in, and through, cyberspace shapes the biological materialities of bodies whilst also collapsing neat distinctions between offline and online worlds. Virtual vectors of spectating, salivating and digesting are disembodied and yet corporeal. Eating is seen to take place beyond and among bodies and to be dissipated both spatially and temporally. As such, cyberspace is outside and other to lived corporeality, and yet also folded into and productive of the intimate geographies and embodied subjectivities of everyday lives. As eating takes myriad forms across the de-materialised viscerality of the Internet, it also emerges as central to the production and ‘matter(ing)’ of cyberspace itself; this is (an) eating space in which what is eaten, by whom and with what bodies, perpetually shifts. Thus, seeking to contribute to geographical scholarship on affect and food, this paper engages with eating as both the subject of enquiry and also as a productive pathway into an interrogation of cyberspace and its place within the affective productions of the everyday. It suggests that this is a key site in which to explore the intimate socialities, materialities and biopolitics of food. Keywords Affect; Anorexia nervosa; Cyberspace; Eating; Food porn; Online research; Pro-anorexia; Viscerality 1. Introduction At first glance food porn and pro-anorexia websites might seem to have little in common other than their ‘location’ in cyberspace. Yet, taking an interrogation of the act of eating as its focus, this paper suggests that the virtual consumption of imagised food is central to both. Beginning by exploring food porn as viewed, the discussion sets out to unearth the affective viscerality of looking at images of foods whose material presence is spatially and temporally elsewhere. This reveals such engagements to go beyond visceral viewing and constitute, instead, acts of eating. Conceptualising food porn as corporeally consumed in this way opens up an analytic pathway into an interrogation of eating itself. This has been argued to be an act that forges connections between bodies across distances (cf. Abbots and Lavis, 2013a and Probyn, 2000). Extending that work, here it is eating itself that is dis-assembled and reconnected in diverging ways; the consumption of food porn gives rise to nascent and contingent forms of eating. It emerges as an act that not only transcends and produces the materiality of food but also that is enacted in myriad ways which stretch beyond and among bodies. As such, although recent scholarship has argued for the need to take account of eating bodies in social and cultural explorations of food (cf. Abbots and Lavis, 2013b), turning our attention to cyberspace also suggests the necessity of interrogating the uncertainty and contingency in eating’s relationship to bodily materialities, as these may become dislocated. With this reconfiguring of eating in mind, the final part of the paper ‘follows’ (Appadurai, 1986, Cook et al., 2004 and Cook et al., 2006) food porn into pro-anorexia websites to explore how imagised food is engaged with by participants there. Although an attention to these cyberspaces might seem to signify a focus on only one highly-specific enactment of the eating of food porn, it is one that is analytically central to this paper. How some individuals with anorexia eat in ways that bypass bodily incorporation, and the role of food porn in these processes, underpin the analysis of this paper and its theorising about eating. I have suggested elsewhere that such enactments of eating maintain an illness that is profoundly dangerous and distressing and yet which may also offer a way of being in the world to individuals affected by it (Lavis, 2013 and Lavis, 2015). Against the background of those discussions, and maintaining a constant recognition of anorexia as a frequently ‘miserable and life blighting’ (Palmer, 2014: iii) illness, my focus here is different. This paper asks how the eating of food porn, and the ways in which this calls into question what is meant both by ‘food’ and ‘eating,’ further wider theorising of the act of eating. As such, it seeks to contribute to existing geographical enquiry into affect and food. Ian Cook et al. has suggested that ‘food is more than just an area of geographical enquiry. It offers rich, tangible entryways into almost any issue in which you might be interested’ (2013: 343). Echoing more literal reflections on circulations and flows, such as those of food ‘from farm to fork’ (Jackson et al., 2006. See also Coles, 2013, Cook et al., 2004 and Cook et al., 2006), one area into which food has recently offered geographers an entryway is an exploration of affect. An attention to affect in geography (cf. Anderson, 2006, Pile, 2011b, Thrift, 2004 and Woodward and Lea, 2009) has included reflections on differences or slippages between affect and emotion (Dawney, 2011, Pile, 2010 and Pile, 2011a) and even engagements with the molecular (McCormack, 2007). This has echoed a wider concern across the social sciences with the ‘capacities to affect and be affected that give everyday life the quality of a continual motion of relations’ (Stewart, 2007: 2. See also Clough, 2008, Clough and Halley, 2007, Massumi, 2002 and Navaro-Yashin, 2012). As such, alongside more literal interrogations of the Internet as virtual space, scholars have explored the ‘virtuality’ (Deleuze, 1991; see also Grosz, 2005) embedded in material life. Characterised by potentiality, this has arguably been at the heart of many geographical reflections on affects as ‘virtual synesthetic perspectives anchored in (functionally limited by) the actually existing, particular things that embody them’ (Massumi, 2002, 35–6. See also McCormack, 2003 and Thrift, 2004). Keeping both meanings of the virtual visible, and exploring their intersections, thus, this paper will explore how eating and not eating maps materiality as virtual and the Internet as visceral. Defined by Longhurst et al. as ‘the sensations, moods and ways of being that emerge from our sensory engagement with the material and discursive environments in which we live’ (2009: 334), the visceral has been argued to be a way in which to understand identity and power through the materiality of everyday experience (Hayes-Conroy and Hayes-Conroy, 2008. See also Guthman, 2003 and Hayes-Conroy and Hayes-Conroy, 2010). Viscerality therefore offers up the possibility of reflecting on the materiality of social relations. Elspeth Probyn, for example, has suggested that eating ‘can be a mundane exposition of the visceral nature of our connectedness and distance from each other, from ourselves and from our social environment’ (2000: 13). Complementing this focus on viscerality, work beyond geography has also explored connections and relations that are produced or ruptured, mattered or displaced by eating.

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